


3 am snack

by d__T



Series: The Afternoon Light Cuts to Size [11]
Category: Blood Drive (TV)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Flashbacks, I'm allergic to my own angst sorry, Implied/Referenced Torture, Insults, M/M, Telephone Calls, canon typical cannibalism, excessive use of The Dead Weather as chapter titles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-26 01:55:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13847619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d__T/pseuds/d__T
Summary: you know that meme likeme at three am going to the kitchen to get some water and I hear a suspicious sound [LASER EYES]this is that fic





	1. And you know what that means?

Normally, it’s Slink who doesn’t sleep during filming. He’s propelled by an endless manic energy, ruining every obstacle in his path and fueled by all the lives flowing through his fingers. And Rasher follows like his shadow; dog and executioner.

But not this time. Rasher hasn’t really slept since he got back, was  _ returned _ . Not in more than fits and starts, wedged into tight corners and between setpieces.

 

* * *

 

“Julian,” he says, feeling like he’s kneeling even as he looms over Slink. “I can’t. I  _ can’t _ .”

He feels like he’s gonna fall out of his skin. Julian laughs, reaching up to pull his head down by the little tuft of his beard. Julian kisses him, harsh and grinning and secure in the knowledge that Rasher is  _ his _ no matter what happens. The shove lands on the corset, above where his ribs gape bare bone and it hurts it  _ hurts _ .

As he stumbles back, he can feel his body shifting under the corset. Reading Slink as a threat. Everything is a threat,  _ everything _ . Tentacles flick stupidly at the shell of the corset. Tap tap, like a bomb.

He staggers to his trailer, feeling like an eon since this morning. Body thinking about the comforting dark claustrophobia of all the time he spent under the A/V bench in the past. He strips the corset off with shaking fingers, rolls himself tightly into a blanket, and collapses.


	2. It means you're dead.

He walks, ghostlike, through a laboratory level inside Heart Enterprises. The little wheely thing his IV is hooked into trails after him with a gentle but irritating squeak; could be anything from saline to sedative in there and he’ll never know. He wonders if this is where they created Slink, in these cold rooms that reek of antiseptic death.

He walks, feeling not lost but circular in time until he finds a break room. Real food would be nice after however long he’s spent on the IV. His stomach rumbles approvingly at the thought.

At the sound, a group of technicians and nurses look up from their shared pizza and shrink back at the sight of him.

He tries to smile at them. I just want pizza. I just want to go home, wherever that is.

He tries to smile, and his body shifts. Stretches and mutates and he shatters-


	3. Praise god.

Heart snatched Rasher four weeks before Season 3’s filming start date, and held him captive for three weeks. There’s no way the timing wasn’t deliberate, or that it wasn’t a deliberate jab at Slink. An experiment, yet another in an endless string, to see if they could make Slink bend and break. And once again, Heart failed.

Had failed to break Slink. Rasher is on the other side of broken and Slink hasn’t even noticed. He’s not sure he was supposed to survive. He’s angry, resentful, fuck you  _ pay attention to me _ , and hungry. So  _ so _ hungry.

Stealing corpses out of the fuel pile to eat isn’t a good look on him and he knows it.

He’s made of bone and anger and the feeling of his fingers tight around the dark stained wood of the axe and fuck, he doesn’t care  _ he doesn’t care. _

The axehead bites into meat, he swings again, bone. He misses the days when he hunted for sport, when he didn’t eat roadkill, when it was a sharp knife stripping meat from bone and cleverness and  _ fun _ . He stamps his boot down on the thigh of the corpse so he can yank the cut piece of leg free. 

This part is somehow more awkward than having to wear a corset to keep tentacles from randomly falling out of the slice in his torso during the course of everyday life. Somehow. He yaws backwards, encouraging the maw to open, not that it needs much encouragement these days, and stuffs the chunk of leg in while aggressively not thinking about his body volume relative the volume of corpse he’s already eaten.

When will it stop?

_ When _ . He gives up and kneels down so he can tug what’s left of the corpse into his body as one chunk. It’s easier this way, like the more he eats the stronger he gets.

He knows he shouldn’t eat another, they need these bodies for morning fuel up. 

He pulls another to himself, lines it up and starts pulling in. Tentacles lick out of the maw to help and he watches mesmerized as he helps his fucked up body reel the corpse in and chew it up into another dimension. And it feels  _ so fucking good _ . 

Dawn bleeds over into the shadows of the mountains and what the race needs fades from his mind as the light twists him into a monster. Stick thin arms and bony back increasingly elongated and the writhing mass of his belly hanging down as he crawls over to another body and chews it up into himself like it’s nothing. 

He doesn’t recognize his hands now, darkened like the ruined flesh of his belly, longer, clawed, three of them. But they feel  _ right _ . Like this is the way he’s supposed to be.


	4. Thank you god.

Screaming hardly warrants Slink’s attention anymore, except it’s ass o’clock in the AM when the rest of the Mayhem Party and entourage should be fucking  _ asleep _ . He pulls boots on and steps outside. It looks like a small but particularly vicious whirlwind ripped through camp- half the race cars are gone, the other half are spattered with gore and not in the way that implies a recent fueling. And there’s a ruckus in the roadie’s trailer, which isn’t unusual at more awake times of the day but that’s an awful lot of blood for ass o’clock seeping out from under the door.

“Rasher!” He yells. If Rasher isn’t already on the problem, he’d better have a fucking explanation for this.

He leans back into his trailer to grab up his cane before he strides over to the other trailer. He doesn’t generally deal with the roadies as that’s usually Rasher’s domain, but that’s not gonna stop him now. He sneaks the tip of the cane into the door and pries it open a little so that he can peer obliquely into the darkness.

Blood falls out of the door and onto the toes of his boots. He’s just about to commit to venturing into the darkness when two bright eyes snap up to look at him and he’s slammed over backwards by  _ something _ into the dirt.

His last thought is that he didn’t remember seeing anything that looked like  _ that _ in Heart’s basement menagerie of horrors. And he would know, he was a member of that menagerie.


	5. You know I treat you like a joke

Rasher wakes up with the sun scorching his tender face and back meats, and a boner that is surprising in that neither he nor his body have had the energy for that in weeks. He feels pretty normal, all things considered, for the first time since he-

-oh shit, he ate the entire Blood Drive. He pops fully awake in a panic, forgetting that he can’t see for shit in the sun anymore, and scrabbles around blindly in the dirt trying to figure out where he is and what hell is happening.

“Welcome back.” Julian’s voice says laconically.

Rasher freezes, facing the direction of Julian’s voice. He squeaks, “I ate you!”

“You sure did. And my entire race, and your precious roadies, too.”

Slink is probably glaring at him, not that he can make out more than vague shapes in the unholy glare of the sun. “I got _hungry_ and someone startled me and I flipped out.”

“Hungry.” Slink says. “You ate everyone, including me, because you were hungry.”

“Yeah.” Rasher says defensively.

“What the fuck.”

“You’re one of Heart’s monsters. Why are you so fucking surprised?”

Slink pouts. “You ate me, like the rest of _them_.”

Rasher ugly laughs. “You want to be special. Holy shit. You know what? I’m not hungry for the first time since they took me and I’m not sorry. You’re just meat. Like me. Like them. It doesn’t fucking mean anything.”

“None of this means anything. It’s just television. Fuck you, fuck your race.” Rasher takes a guess that Slink’s sitting on a car and drags himself into what will hopefully be the shadow of it.

“It means something to _me_ , even if it’s just television to everyone else.” Julian makes a choked off sound. “I thought it mattered to you.”

“It’s a job, Julian. It’s supposed to be a _job_ . I got invested and now I’m _this_ . _Let me go_.”

“Then go.” Slink snarls. “Go. I’ll do this myself.”

Rasher lays in the shadow of the car, wishing. He can’t go anywhere until nightfall when he can see again, and Slink won’t help him now. So he’s stuck. Again.

And he knows that by evening, he'll stay.


	6. But you can't tell when I'm joking

The phone rings. Julian looks at it, then at Rasher. “That’s for you.”

“No.” Rasher says gruffly, looking fixedly away from it.

Julian sighs and picks up the phone. “Julian Slink speaking. What can I do for you this fine afternoon?”

“Hii, this is Gerrard and we were just reviewing yesterday’s footage. It looks like, uh, whatshisface turning into a monster and … ate everyone? That’s an interesting direction to go in, especially since there’s two more days left in the projected race schedule.”

Gerrard stops speaking, clearly waiting for Julian to reply. Julian says nothing as Rasher dramatically rolls his eyes. 

Gerrard, sounding more nervous, asks, “Yes, hello? Julian?”

“Hello!” Julian chirps. Rasher giggles.

“We were hoping for an explanation?”

“Oh! Well, you should have said so!” Julian simpers. “You see, whatever you did to my  _ darling _ Rasher turned him into some kind of insatiable people eating monster that goes berserk when he’s stressed out and I just  _ can’t _ imagine what you thought would happen!”

“Uh.” Says Gerrard. “What?”

“I’m  _ so _ sorry, did the Old Man do this without letting you all know? Is he keeping secrets from you again?” Julian’s air of concern decays into a snarl. “Or are you just stupid and oblivious?”

Gerrard stammers as someone else calls in.

“Hi, hello, Julian speaking. Who just called in? Oh, I don’t care. As I was just telling this sniveling toenail here, I have some  _ notes _ for you this time.”

“If you stopped using a god damn rotary phone, Julian. The new millennium is almost here and you’re stuck in 1940-”

“Functional set piece.” Julian snaps. “Shut up.”

“Your loyalty, right now, is more in question that ever before, especially with yesterday’s events.”

“Are you  _ quite _ done yet? Yeah, thanks. Now as I am sure you are all aware, Rasher-” Rasher perks up at the sound of his name like the world’s worst lap dog before staring into space again- “is a critical part of Blood Drive operation. He’s also mine, not yours. If this is another experiment to see what  _ I _ can take, stop fucking with my subordinates and allow me to salvage the shambles  _ you _ made of my show into something impressive.”

There’s an intake of breath on the line, but Julian barrels onwards. “I know my metrics. Blood Drive has two seasons of solid performance and the hype for season three is tremendous. The teasers we’ve released have done just that: teased the viewers into a frothing mess. Merchandising is doing fantastically on that. I am making you money, and you fools are trying to kneecap me.”

“Remember that you  _ created _ me to excel at this. I won’t fail.” Julian hangs up the phone with an authoritative clatter.

Rasher has a boner and he’s not even sure why because Julian  _ once again  _ made it all about himself.


End file.
